Businesses generate data about their customers, their products, and their operations every time a transaction is recorded in a database. This data provides a key competitive asset—something available to your business that no one else has access to. How can this asset be put to maximum advantage? Our answer is data mining.

Data mining means many things to many people. For social scientists and economists, the phrase often has a negative connotation, because it refers to finding data to fit an already-decided conclusion ("Marijuana leads to heroin" or "The Bush tax cuts benefited the middle class"). The New York Times and other news outlets have used the phrase "data mining" to refer to attacks on personal privacy, governments spying on citizens, and corporations spying on customers. For computer scientists, data mining may refer to a range of sophisticated algorithms devised in machine learning labs.

For us, the story is much simpler and less sinister. Data mining provides a competitive advantage by making better use of data that a business already collects in the normal course of business operations. As we wrote in Data Mining Techniques for Marketing, Sales, and Customer Support, "Data mining is the exploration and analysis of large quantities of data in order to discover meaningful patterns and rules." We use those patterns and rules to inform business decisions and guide future actions.

In December, 1997, we founded Data Miners because we wanted to connect business problems to business data. Ten years later we are proud to have succeeded in what we set out to do—helping customers listen to their data.

Over the years, we have helped our clients solve many of their toughest analytical problems, such as: